Words, meanings, and discourse in Argentina: an ethnopragmatic study of Porteno Spanish

Abstract

This thesis captures the meanings of a selection of words that are widely used in Porteno Spanish (spoken in Buenos Aires, the capital city of Argentina) and which lack precise equivalents in other languages and cultures. It also captures the meanings of culture-specific discourses that Portenos (people from Buenos Aires) recurrently perform when they use these words. The argument is that the selected targets (i.e. words and discourses) are culturally significant to all Argentines, because their meanings have historically functioned as guides in Argentines’ interpretation of the world. Most specifically, the thesis argues that these targets are the “offspring” of a nation building project, advanced by the elites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which aimed to “civilize” Argentina with European values and people. To analyze the meanings of these targets, the study uses ethnopragmatics, also known as the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach. This approach enables fine-grained meaning analysis which can accurately reflect local perspectives encoded in words and discourses. Importantly, with ethnopragmatics, these local perspectives are also made available to cultural outsiders and speakers of other languages. This is because the approach describes meaning via a mini-language of simple, cross-translatable terms. All meaning hypotheses in this study are grounded in evidence from natural language usage. This evidence was obtained from various sources, including newspaper articles, radio and TV programs, stand-up comedy performances, short stories, tango lyrics, and the corpora CORDE, CREA, and CORPES XXI produced by Real Academia Espanola. The meaning hypotheses were also trialed with native speakers and discussed with cultural consultants. Briefly, the major findings are summarized as follows. Ch. 3 analyses two expressions: Buenos Aires es la Paris de Sudamerica (‘Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America’) and Los argentinos descienden de los barcos (‘Argentines descend from the ships’). It is shown that their meanings involve high compression of culture-specific knowledges and narratives which serve a powerful role in the erasure of un-European places and people. Ch. 4 analyses the word lunfardo (roughly, ‘Buenos Aires’ slang’). It is shown that its meaning compresses a historical narrative that invites people to think of Argentine words as being largely migrated from Europe. It is also argued that the word lunfardo encodes (a) metapragmatic attitudes which are reflective of historical discourses organized around that word, and (b) a link to tango music. Ch. 5 analyses the cultural value viveza criolla (roughly, ‘artful cheating’), and its associated social category words vivo (roughly, ‘cunning person’) and boludo (roughly, ‘moron’). It is shown that, by labelling an action or way of thinking as viveza criolla, speakers view it as an expression of local culture, and as a widely celebrated but antisocial form of relating with others. Vivo and boludo, it is argued, are culture-specific frames for categorizing and evaluating someone as one of two kinds of people with radically opposite ways of thinking and acting. Ch. 6 analyses the emotion word bronca (roughly, ‘anger’), identifying three distinct meanings. The analysis suggests that one of these meanings, bronca1, offers Portenos a fatalistic interpretation of reality. It places people in the position of passive “onlookers” of inevitable scenarios that unfold in front of their eyes in a compelling way. It is shown that bronca1 plays an important role in the emotional processing of deep-seated problems in Argentine society, with discursive saliency in themes such as political corruption, economic crisis, poverty, and lack of moral standards, all of which are typically framed under the discursive logics of viveza criolla. Ch. 7 captures various discourses around which Argentines organize the words studied in Ch. 3 to 6. By performing these discourses, or “Argentineity scripts”, as they are here called, locals can celebrate and also condemn all that which they view as distinctively Argentine, and, in doing so, they perpetuate historical discourses of nationhood. Altogether, the various analyses offer original, culturally sensitive insights into locals’ construal of Argentine places, people, language, and emotions. In clear, nonethnocentric terms, the analyses articulate the local logics encapsulated in Porteno words and discourses, revealing how speakers visualize the country’s past, imagine the country’s future, but also navigate their everyday lives. The thesis is a postcolonial-linguistic contribution to ethnopragmatics, to NSM-based studies, to the study of Porteno and Argentine language and culture, and to the study of World Spanishes.